Here's the distinguished gentleman from Montana, Democratic Senator Max Baucus, excoriating Republicans for not going along with ObamaCare, and sounding like he just got back from a long lunch with the Jagermeister Girls.

When a 23 year old Nigerian terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, smuggled more than 80 grams of PETN (a nitroglycerin-related liquid explosive used by the military) onto Northwest flight 253 in an attempt to blow up the plane, the only reason his Christmas day suicide bombing attempt failed was because of a faulty detonator. Mutallab did detonate his explosive device on the flight. It just didn't work properly, or many innocent people would now be dead. In addition, Mutallab was on a terrorist watch list, though not on the no-fly list. He had a valid U.S. visa, even though his own father alerted the U.S. embassy six months ago that his son was a religious extremist who posed a danger to the United States. The AP is reporting that an anonymous official said the U.S. suspected Mutallab had terrorist ties over two years ago.

You have to hand it to the Democrats. No matter what objective reality this country finds itself in, the Democrats have the capability to utterly deny it. If we are $12 trillion in debt, the Democrats think the answer is more debt. If we have $56 trillion in unfunded entitlement liabilities, the Democrats think we need more entitlements. If we have 10% unemployment, the Democrats enact business-punishing policies (health care reform, cap-and-trade). If people are struggling to get by, the Democrats think we need to be taxed more. If George W. Bush grows the deficit and debt, which the Democrats hated, the Democrats think the answer is to grow the deficits and debt twice as fast. If we are at war, the Democrats think the answer is to lose the war (see Iraq). If we are in a recession, the Democrats think the answer is to punish business and enact anti-free market policies. When the federal government is already growing at unprecedented rates, the Democrats think the answer is to grow government much, much more.

If I didn't know better, I'd think the Democrats were TRYING to destroy this country on purpose.

If some of you wonder why I'm obsessed with the rapidly increasing government spending and debt, I'll try to explain it in this post. I'll try to explain what the implications of this unsustainable fiscal irresponsibility will be, what it will mean for the future. There is no bigger long-term threat we face as a country, other than certain national security issues (such as terrorists detonating wmd inside the U.S). Lots of the information contained in this post can be found in The State Of The Union's Finances, A Citizens Guide, put out by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, whose CEO is former Comptroller General David Walker (who everybody in the country should be listening to. I'd make him the next President if I could).

The federal government's massive ripoff of the American taxpayer continues. The Senate and House have both passed the $1.1 trillion Omnibus spending bill for 2010, and President Obama is expected to sign it. The bill raises spending by about 10% over last year, even though the last time I checked, the inflation rate for this year was negative, as the economy shrunk during the recession. Like I said in a recent post titled 'A Recession-Proof Industry,' there's no recession in Washington D.C.

The spending bill contains 5,000 earmarks in the amount of $3.9 billion, naturally. That might not sound like a lot, relatively speaking, until you consider that the spending portion of Obama's stimulus package (those so-called shovel-ready projects) were basically nothing but thousands of earmark projects bundled together. One count had 9,000 earmarks in the stimulus bill, even though the White House laughably claimed there were none. The White House did this in the typical government way. They simply called the earmark projects something else.

While reading an Associated Press article about how developing countries, led by China and India, are boycotting the UN climate talks in Copenhagen, I came upon the following reference to Al Gore, the world's pre-eminent climatologist, who graduated from Harvard with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Government (Gore did take a class on climate science, however):

When times get tough, as in the current recession, businesses are forced to cut back. They halt expansion plans, reign in expenses, and lay off workers. We've seen a lot of that in the last couple years, as over 7 million people have lost their jobs. Individuals also cut back on expenses.

However, there is one group of people who have done quite well during the "worst economic downturn since the Great Depression," as President Obama would say. That group of people is the government itself. Far from cutting back, the government has been expanding and handing out big raises during these harsh times. The rich government bureaucrats are getting richer. As USA Today reports:

There is something unseemly about a President who is as unceasingly partisan as is Barack Obama. I don't think I've ever heard this President give a speech where he wasn't shifting blame away from himself and his party, even when it flies directly in the face of the facts. That's one reason many speak of Obama as being in permanent campaign mode (another reason is that Obama IS in permanent campaign mode). Obama has changed the presidential motto from 'the buck stops here' to 'pass the buck.' The President's recent comments about the TARP program serve as a perfect example. Speaking of using the $200 billion in leftover TARP funds for job creation, Obama said this:

Though the West Pointers didn't seem overly thrilled with President Obama's Afghanistan strategy speech (as MSNBC windbag Chris Matthews said, Obama was in the "enemy camp,") I thought Obama's speech was pretty good, up to a point. He committed 30,000 more troops to a counterinsurgency strategy to remove the Taliban from the portion of the country they control, in order to stop Al Qaeda from returning and gaining the safe haven they had there prior to the 9/11 attacks. Good. Up to 40% of Afghanistan is either under Taliban control or highly vulnerable, mainly the southeast and Pakistan border region. Obama went on to say the Afghan government needed to beef up it's security forces and take responsibility, because the USA wasn't going to stay in Afghanistan forever. Good. General McChrystal heartily endorses the plan, which we can call The Obama Surge. Good. Obama's strategy is an attempt to reverse years of floundering about as the Taliban presence increased in Afghanistan. Good.

Political opposition to The Obama Surge is split mainly along the usual lines. Conservatives support the Surge, but are wondering why Obama announced an Afghanistan exit date of July 2011 (18 months from now), signaling to the enemy how long they'll have to wait us out in order to succeed. Liberals, on the other hand, are mad about the whole idea of a surge, wishing instead that the USA would just pull all the troops out now, the consequences be damned. Liberals are saying that July 2011 date better be a firm date.